Back in June 2024, Microsoft unexpectedly removed the Windows key C keyboard shortcut for launching the Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11 and replaced it with a dedicated Copilot key on newer keyboards. That was followed up with a Copilot voice chat keyboard shortcut and then later with a "Hey Copilot" verbal launch trigger. As of update KB5058502--the optional May patch that released yesterday for Windows 11 23H2--the Windows key C keyboard shortcut has been reinstated. Tap it to launch Copilot in text chat mode or long-press it to launch Copilot in voice chat mode. A similar update will be released for Windows 11 24H2, reports Windows Latest.

Extinction is a part of nature. Of the five billion species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 per cent have vanished. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction, two hundred million years ago, finished off the crocodile-like phytosaur. Sixty-six million years ago, the end-Cretaceous extinction eliminated the Tyrannosaurus rex and the velociraptor; rapid climate change from an asteroid impact was the likely cause. The Neanderthals disappeared some forty thousand years ago. One day--whether from climate change, another asteroid, nuclear war, or something we can't yet imagine--humans will probably be wiped out, too.

Recreating the species from that raw biological material is relatively straightforward in principle, if exceedingly painstaking in practice. The work involves pinpointing the genes responsible for the traits that separate the mammoth from the Asian elephant--its close evolutionary relation--editing an elephant stem cell to express those traits, and introducing the stem cell into an elephant embryo. In the alternative, scientists could edit a newly conceived Asian elephant zygote directly. Either way, the next step would be to implant the resulting embryo into the womb of a modern-day female elephant. After 22 months--the typical elephant gestation period--an ice age mammoth should, at least theoretically, be born into the computer-age world.

Back in 2012, Canadian freelance writer Joshua Barbeau tragically lost his fiancée, Jessica, when she succumbed to a rare liver disease. Eight years later and still struggling with his grief, Barbeau came across a curious website called Project December, billed as'the world's most super computer'. Powered by an early version of OpenAI's ChatGPT, for just 5, Project December let him recreate an AI version of Jessica if he typed in details of what she had been like. After typing'Jessica?', the AI version of his deceased girlfriend told him: 'I miss you every single day' and'I am the girl that you are madly in love with.' Speaking on a new BBC documentary'Storyville: Eternal You', Barbeau, now 36, found the eerie tech'uncannily' similar to his loved one. He says: 'It really felt like a gift, like a weight had been lifted that I had been carrying for a long time.'

The newest version of Sonos' mobile app is still very bad--so bad, the company is considering ditching the newly redesigned version of the app and bringing back the older version. This news, reported by The Verge, comes along with reports that Sonos is also laying off 100 employees. Things first went awry for Sonos when it released the new version of its app in May. It was met with almost universal disdain. Users found the new app format made it difficult to connect to a network, queue up songs, or even change the volume. One of the key complaints was that many of the accessibility features in the legacy app were either poorly implemented in the redesign or removed from the platform entirely.

A tech expert with a track record of predicting sea changes in the industry has made several eye-popping new forecasts in a new book. Google's Ray Kurzweil famously predicted the iPhone era and the fact that a computer would beat someone at chess by 1998. In his new book, 'The Singularity is Nearer', Kurzweil predicts that humans fully merge with AI, becoming immortal cyborgs, by 2045. He also predicts that advancements in AI will make it possible to resurrect loved ones and connect our brains to cloud technology, in what he calls the'fifth epoch' of human intelligence. Google's Ray Kurzweil believes immortality is around the corner (Getty) The singularity is the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually surpass human intelligence, fundamentally changing human existence.

Fifteen years ago, former Nebraska and Arizona State quarterback Sam Keller filed a class-action lawsuit that in 2013 resulted in Electronic Arts Sports mothballing its popular College Football video game. The game featured players that did not have real-life names, but resembled every player on every roster in almost every other way. EA settled with Keller, et al., for 40 million, and the NCAA chipped in another 20 million. Sounds like a lot but payments to each player ranged from about 1,500 to 15,000. Keller, for his part, was flogged in the public square of social media for "ruining the video game for us."

Can artificial intelligence really summon dead relatives back from beyond the grave? A growing number of people are trying to find out, with pioneers such as inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil using artificial intelligence to recreate lost relatives. Kurzweil's attempts to'bring back' his father - who died when Kurzweil was 22 - using AI began more than 10 years ago and are chronicled this year in a comic book by Kurzweil's daughter Amy. Kurzweil created a'replicant' of his father by feeding an artificial intelligence system with his father's letters, essays and musical compositions. He now has even more ambitious plans to bring his father back to life using nanotechnology and DNA from his father's buried bones.

On January 17 1803, a young man named George Forster was hanged for murder at Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection though - Forster was going to be electrified. Giovanni Aldini's experiments with a human corpse - one of the first, and most controversial, to attempt to reanimate a human using electricity Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician who demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses, when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. Galvani one day observed his assistant using a scalpel on a nerve in a frog's leg; when a nearby electric generator created a spark, the frog's leg twitched, prompting Galvani to develop his famous experiment.

Forgotten memories have been reawakened in mice with Alzheimer's disease, suggesting that the condition may not actually destroy our memories, but instead impair our ability to recall them. It has long been assumed that Alzheimer's disease completely erases memories. The condition involves clumps of proteins known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles accumulating in the brain, where they are thought to destroy the neurons that store our memories. But experiments by Christine Denny at Columbia University and her colleagues suggest that memories may not be wiped by Alzheimer's disease, but instead become harder to access. What's more, these memories can be reawakened by artificially activating the neurons they are stored in. The finding could be revolutionary, says Ralph Martins at Edith Cowan University in Australia.